


In the Way

by Cordria



Category: Danny Phantom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-13
Updated: 2019-10-13
Packaged: 2020-12-14 10:57:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 19,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21014645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cordria/pseuds/Cordria
Summary: A twisted tale of a summer spent all alone. (originally posted to Fanfiction in 2007. Reposted here in 2019. Not yet edited.)





	1. Prologue

_-Danny_

I stumbled down the stairs to the kitchen, my vision blurred from the tears. I didn't really know what was going on and I couldn't remember what had happened. All I knew what that I had to get away from _it._ I couldn't stay in my room with _it_ anymore.

My parents were sitting at the kitchen table. They were eating supper – a supper that I had skipped out on. Mom looked up when I entered the room. "Phantom?" she asked softly, concern in her voice.

It was the sound of her voice that drew me to look up and meet her eyes. Instantly, a wave of disgust blew through me. Of course she was worried about Phantom. She didn't _know_.

I blinked at her a few times, trying to clear the tears from my eyes. All I succeeded in doing was knocking them loose from my eyes and letting them trickle down my cheek. "I'm sorry," I whispered. "I didn't mean to…"

Mom smiled gently at me. "It's okay."

Dad pushed a chair out and asked me to sit down and talk. I just shook my head. "I'm sorry," I repeated. Turning my gaze down to the ground, I watched one of my tears sparkle against the linoleum.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. Mom was looking at me strangely, her eyebrows furrowed. "What's wrong?"

I glanced back at the stairs that led upstairs. She followed my gaze, her eyes narrowing as she contemplated what secrets the stairs might hold. I trembled slightly as I repeated the only thing I could think of to say. "I'm sorry."

Mom had finally caught on. Her eyes widened. "Danny?"

I nodded slightly. My throat was closed up. I couldn't talk. Not even to say those two precious words. Those two words that meant so much.

She pushed me out of the way as she raced up the stairs. Dad almost knocked me over as he followed her, his bulk making the floor rattled and creak. I stood there in the kitchen, shimmering tears trickling down my pale cheeks as I realized what had just happened. I was alone. Again. They had left me.

They didn't really care about Phantom. In the end, what does Phantom have over Danny? Nothing. After everything I had done, I was _still_ in the way.

I sank to the floor and buried my face in my hands, finally giving in to the pain that was racing through me. Nobody cared. No matter what I did, I was just in the way.

Only now I could remember very clearly why _it_ was upstairs in my room.


	2. Meetings

_-Danny_

I started out the summer thinking everything was going to be great. My friends and I would sit around in front of the air conditioner and waste the days playing games and visiting the water park. But then Jazz decided to go to some summer pre-college program, my best friend Tucker got a last-minute call to go to some special technology camp and would be gone until August, and my other best friend, Sam, had finally been captured (after fighting tooth and nail for nearly two weeks) and trucked off to some school for girls for the summer. Even Valerie had vanished to some summer program.

I ended up being stuck at home, alone. With my parents. Strangely, I was kind of looking forward to it.

I'm not entirely sure why.

* * *

_-Danny_

I slipped lower through the soft clouds, twirling through a few barrel rolls and letting my eyes drift closed. Everything was so _peaceful_. Amity Park was buzzing below me, the crowds of newly-freed kids were planning their summers of doing nothing, and even the birds were happily singing. It was the perfect day.

That, in and of itself, was troubling when I stopped to think about it. I'm the 'ghost-hero' of Amity Park and I'm completely jinxed when it comes to _perfect_ days. Tucker's been keeping track of it. If there's a perfect day out there, or a perfect situation, or something I'm just _dying_ to not miss… a ghost will show up, or some annoying ghost hunters will appear, or something else will happen that will ultimately end up ruining all my plans. It never fails.

My fingers trailed just over the tops of the roofs as I scanned the ground, suppressing a small grin when people actually waved to me. Just a few months ago, they would have pointed and screamed and run as fast as they could. I waved back to a few of them, sliding into invisibility before I turned to fly towards home.

Despite my best efforts, I couldn't find a single thing wrong in Amity Park today: no ghosts, no ghost hunters (except for my father, who was busy terrorizing a tree on Route 17), no _nothing_. When I landed softly on the top of the Ops Center, I glanced uneasily over my shoulder. This was just… _wrong_. It was a beautiful summer day and I was free to enjoy it.

I shuddered. It was _so_ wrong.

I phased through the door into the attic-based lab, turning myself human before my feet even touched the floor. "Mom?" I called softly, not really wanting her to answer. All I was doing was testing to see if she was hiding in the lab someplace.

Grinning at the silence (and at not having to try to explain how I 'mysteriously' got into the Ops Center), I padded across the lab, down the stairs, and into my room. I flopped onto my bed and sighed, trying to figure out what could possibly be going on.

_Why wasn't I being hunted?_ Where was Skulker? Why weren't my parents chasing me around town? I hadn't even seen the hint of the Box Ghost's spectral tail for weeks, and he could usually be counted on to bug me every few days. It had been nearly a week since the last time I'd been attacked, and that had just been some no-name dead ventriloquist. I'd never gone more than a day or two without at least being _threatened._

I was still in my room hours later, staring blankly at the ceiling, when my dad drove the Fenton Ghost Assault Vehicle home and clomped into the house, yelling about the haunted tree he'd found.

When the sun began to set in the distance, painting the oh-so-perfect sky in purples and oranges, I was pacing my room. I ended up over by my window, bracing myself against the sill as I stared out into the warm night, questions racing themselves through my head. I wished, not for the first time this summer, that Sam or Tucker… or even Jazz… were around so I could talk to them. Together we could figure anything out.

They weren't here, though, and I had to do this on my own. I sighed and ran a hand through my hair. What was going on? Where were all the ghosts? Were they planning something?

It was all too stressful. The last thing I wanted to think about was all my enemies gathering around a table and talking about how best to ambush me and take over the world.

"Danny? Supper!" my mother yelled up the stairs.

I gazed out into the evening sky for a few more minutes, trying to prod my mind into coming up with a brilliant plan to figure everything out. It was right before my hand touched the bedroom door's knob that one sparked in my brain. "Oh," I whispered with a grin, "perfect."

There was more than one way to figure out where all the ghosts were hiding. Now all I had to do was wait for tonight.

* * *

_-Maddie_

It was the most innocuous thing. For the briefest of moments as I stood there at the top of the steps, I could almost see the boy as nothing more than a simple, harmless spirit.

He was down in the lab, sitting on Jack's computer chair, spinning around in dizzying circles. Fingers were clamped on the chair's edges, feet flicking out to push the chair faster and faster, white hair flying in every direction. Over and over I saw glimpses of his electric eyes, his face stretched into a happy smile, as he whipped around in rapid circles.

I held perfectly still, watching him as butterflies danced in my stomach. The most powerful being in Amity Park was about twenty feet away and I couldn't tear my eyes away from him. For a moment, the idea that I should at least _try _to catch him crossed my mind, accompanied by that odd, queasy feeling in my stomach. There was no way I'd be able to reach a single weapon before the specter did something. I knew that he could be supernaturally fast when he wanted to be. At least that was my excuse later; at the time I was too fascinated by his presence to want to chase him away.

I stayed where I was, one hand holding the basement door slightly ajar, and watched one of the most powerful ghosts in existence twirl in a mundane computer chair. A few months ago, I would have felt a trickle of fear being this close to him. But now I wasn't so sure what his motives really were. Jazz's constant badgering, along with a strong dose of evidence, had made me stop and consider what he might truly be. I wasn't sure I liked him being in the human world though. He was too powerful… besides, ghosts _belong_ in the Ghost Zone.

I studied the spinning specter quietly, watching his quick and sure movements as he controlled the chair. What would he do when he finally noticed my presence? Would he run like he always did? Or would he show his ghostly colors and attack me now that I'm unarmed and alone?

Suddenly his hand zipped out, catching hold of the edge of a table and stopping his endless rotations. A giddy grin crossed his face even though he didn't seem to be at all dizzy. For a few moments he held perfectly still, perhaps reveling in some ghostly feeling, before his emerald eyes opened. He kicked against the table and sent himself wheeling across the room.

When he stopped the chair on the other side of the room, his fingers tapped against a computer keyboard and he studied the screen. Frowning, he pushed himself back into the middle of the room. "Where are they…" he muttered, his voice overlaid with a ghostly echo. He propped one arm up on his knee and cupped his chin in his hand, staring at the ghost portal.

Digging the toe of his boot into the ground, he sent himself spinning again. Slowly at first, but he easily gained speed.

I forgot myself for a moment and let the door click shut. A spin of the chair, a glimpse of his startled, neon green eyes, and the ghost was gone. I looked around, but all that was left of the specter was the still-spinning chair in the middle of the room. He had chosen to run, again. I sighed and quietly chalked the encounter up as another point in Jazz's argument.

Picking up the ghost tracker on the way to the computer the ghost had been typing on, I carefully scanned the room. Random flickers of energy, but nothing large enough to be a corporeal spirit. Looking at the computer screen, I was startled by the program he'd been running. It was a scanner – one that scanned the Ghost Zone.

Why would a ghost be scanning for other ghosts?

* * *

_-Danny_

"Damn it," I whispered angrily as I dropped back onto my bed, flickering back into my human form. I was so curious about what was going on in the Ghost Zone that I had dropped my guard for a few minutes and had let my mom see me in the lab. I had enough things to worry about without having to wonder about what my parents were thinking.

My mother had been acting so oddly about Phantom lately that I had stepped up my efforts to stay as far away from her as possible. She would get this weird look on her face every time my alter-ego was mentioned. Whatever was up with my mother, it probably wasn't healthy for me. I'd decided weeks ago that the main objective for the summer was to give my parents as few chances as possible to interact with my ghost form.

Unfortunately, the scanner hadn't finished compiling the data yet. I hadn't learned anything from my foray into the lab.

I fell backwards, propping a pillow beneath my head, and glared at the ceiling. _Where were all the ghosts?_

Well, at least I had all of tomorrow to try and figure it out. And all the next day. And all the day after that. And all next _week_. And all next _month_.

With a groan, I rolled over and buried my head in my pillow. For the first time, I began to wonder if I needed more friends. I was going to be so bored. It was a good thing I had a mystery on my hands.

* * *

_-Danny_

Two days later I was standing in the kitchen, trying to decide where my parents were holed up. I figured it would either be the Ops Center or the lab and I was to the point of choosing which to check out first.

I hesitated for a moment, fingering the letter in my hands. It was an invitation to a _legitimate_ mother/son science campout at a nearby state park. I'd already checked to make sure it was real. I really couldn't believe I was sinking this low this fast. I'd only been alone for five days and already I was scrambling for things to do. A _science camp?_ With my _mother? _I shook my head sadly. "Danny, you have officially hit rock bottom and need more friends."

After waiting for a moment to listen for any small explosions that would give their position away (which there weren't), I picked the lab since it was closer and there were fewer steps to climb. Pushing open the door, I stepped down onto the stairs. The lights were on and a dim, green glow was making the steel walls glimmer. "Mom?" I called.

"Down here, sweetie."

Stepping off of the last step, I let a small smile cross my face. Both of my parents were sitting down, working on separate inventions. Hopefully my mom wouldn't be too caught up in something to listen to the idea.

"Mom?" I walked up to her. She was carefully putting some glowing bits into a new invention. "What are you doing?"

She looked up at me and pulled the goggles off of her eyes. "I'm finishing this while we wait for one of our experiments to come out of the oven." She held up the bread-loaf-sized object she was working on. "This is going to be a probe that we can send into the Ghost Zone when it's too dangerous to send a human. I'm trying to get the directional nozzles to fire correctly." Mom carefully set the invention back down and picked up another of the glowing pieces. She slid it into a hole in the side of the barrel. "What did you want, honey?"

"Um…" I glanced down at the letter. Suddenly, this didn't sound like such a good idea after all. Butterflies began dancing in my stomach as questions flittered through my head. Why would she want to go with me – she's got so much other stuff to do. Why couldn't I find something to do with someone my own age? Why a stupid _science _campout?

In the end I just took a deep breath and spilled it out as fast as possible. "I got this letter that there's going to be a mother/son campout this weekend in Spooky Hollow and there's going to be contests and campfires and stuff and I remember how much you wanted to go on that mother/son science thing last time and it didn't work out too great so I was thinking that maybe you and I could go together?" I bit my lip to stop myself from rambling and waited.

And waited. Butterflies had turned into gigantic dancing boulders inside of my stomach. Mom looked up at me, a smile crossing her face. "Sweetie, that's…"

She was interrupted by a shrill beeping. Her head wiped around and she got to her feet, stepping over to the monitor. I followed her, glancing at the glowing screen. On it, the greenish goop seemed to shiver slightly. I shook my head. To me, goop is goop is goop. I don't think I'll ever see the wonderfulness of it. I glanced down at the letter about the campout. "Mom?"

"Danny, can we talk later?" Mom whispered distractedly. She stared down at the display. "Jack! Look at this. The ectoplasmic mitochondria are dividing…"

Dad dropped the invention he'd been working on. He raced over to stare at the microscope, absentmindedly brushing me out of the way. "Look at that!" He grinned. "This is the best thing that has happened all day. This proves our theory!"

Mom twirled around in a small circle, her grin threatening to take over her face. "Jack, this will take _weeks_ to work through! We can't waste a second getting started – we might loose the samples."

I leaned against the wall and tapped my heel on the ground. They didn't even bother to listen to me. Yes, they get carried away with this ghost stuff and they'd been doing this all of my life… but it still stung a bit. Finally, sick of staring at the greenish goop on the computer screen, I started up the stairs.

"Danny?" my father called after me. I ignored him. When I reached the kitchen I crumpled the letter into a tiny ball and lobbed it into the trash.

* * *

_-Jack_

The ghost was asleep. Not too surprising – it _was_ nearly two in the morning and anything sentient really should be in dream land. The fact that he was asleep on my couch was a bit more of a shock.

I leaned over the couch, resting my arms against the back, studying him. Boots kicked off, gloves removed, feet dangling over the edge, he was relaxed against the cushions. A nasty-looking cut on his cheek was still sluggishly bleeding glowing ectoplasm, and his snowy hair was messier than usual. He didn't look all that dangerous at the moment, but I knew appearances could be deceiving.

Here was my chance to catch the infamous Ghost Boy of Amity Park. The weapon's vault was just up the stairs and to the right. The lab was downstairs. I could have everything I needed to destroy the spook for good in a matter of minutes.

I'd be famous, just like I always wanted. Jack Fenton: world renowned ghost hunter. They might even give me a metal. The thought made me smile.

But I didn't move. I'd been standing there, watching the boy sleep, for more than twenty minutes.

Maddie had told me about meeting him in the lab – how he had vanished when he saw her. Not even the smallest attempt at attacking her. And I couldn't get that incident with the vultures and the Wisconsin Ghost out of my head. The boy clearly hadn't been malevolent then either.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for catching ghosts and ripping them apart. Spirits don't belong on this plane of existence and only by catching and dissecting one were we going to get enough information to keep them out of our world. But I wasn't going to obliterate an innocent teenager… at least not when he was doing nothing but sleep.

The clock ticked loudly in the dark silence, chiming away the seconds as I held still, trying to decide what to do. The thought to wake the boy up, send him on his way with a few blasts from an ectogun filtered through my mind, but I dismissed it. _Something_ about the young ghost was preventing me from waking him up.

_Something_ was trying to tell me that the ghost needed his rest.

I finally turned away from the couch, sitting down on the bottom tread of the stairs, propping my chin up on my fist. I'm not much of a thinker. I don't like problems – that's what Maddie is for. She'd be able to solve the problem, but I didn't want to wake her up. She hadn't been sleeping well recently and she needed what sleep she could get.

Minutes passed as I sat there. Finally, with a sigh, I got to my feet and trudged over to the cabinet, yanking out two blankets and a small ectogun that I had stashed beside the television. I couldn't wake the ghost up. Whatever it was inside of me was preventing me from doing that. But there was no way I was going let a ghost sleep in _my_ living room alone.

I tucked the blanket around the boy's shoulders, letting my fingers rest on his chill skin. I'd never touched a ghost before – it was amazing – so much like human skin, just colder than I'd ever thought possible.

Wrapping the other blanket around my shoulders, I settled into the big armchair, wincing at the soft squeaks and groans. The boy moved slightly at the noise, but didn't wake up. Ectogun in one hand, warm blanket surrounding me, I relaxed into the comfort of the chair, prepared to stay up all night. I was not going to sleep with a ghost in the house.

The next thing I knew, Maddie was shaking my shoulder. The sun was rising. I glanced with shock at the couch, but the ghost boy was gone, blanket folded messily into one corner.

* * *

_-Danny_

Summer was officially boring. It had taken less than a week for me to get completely fed up with trying to solve the mystery of the missing ghosts. Dad had turned on nearly every ghost sensor in the lab in the hope that 'Phantom' would be stupid enough to come back. Of course, he told me all about it, so I planned on making sure my ghost half stayed as far away as possible.

With no ghosts around to hunt and release (except for Cujo, who had decided to show up to play tag last night), sneaking into the lab – even to try running the ghost scanner again – didn't seem worth it. I had absolutely no clue what was going on, and there was no guarantee that the limited range of my parent's scanner would tell me anything worth the trouble of disabling all the equipment. So by the time the sun was setting on Sunday, I had given up.

Not that I wasn't still waiting for the hammer to drop and every ghost in existence to suddenly appear on my doorstep… No, it was more like anxiously waiting for the inevitable. I _knew_ the hammer was up there – I could practically see the thing. But I had no idea what to do about it, so I just let it hang there.

I spent hours upon hours staring at the computer screen and playing solo versions of my favorite online games. When that got old, I wandered around Amity Park. After walking down virtually every street in the town, I sat through three showings of 'Dead Teacher VIII: The Return of P.E.'.

At one point, I even tried training on my own. Just outside of city limits there is an old forest with this big clearing where Sam, Tucker, and I had trained before. Just after lunch, I flew out to the forest and hovered in the clearing, trying to decide what to do first. Tucker was the one who kept all the lists and made up the schedules of what needed to be done first.

Finally I held out my hand, letting cool ectoplasmic energy gather in my palm. It drifted lazily between my fingers before I formed it into a ball and tossed it up into the air, playing catch with myself.

I sighed and whipped the baseball-sized glob of energy off into the woods. I didn't want to do this anymore. It wasn't any fun without Sam and Tucker around. After just a few minutes, I ended up flying back to Amity Park and phasing through my bedroom window. I plopped into my desk chair, desperately searching my mind for something to do.

There wasn't _anything_ I wanted to do. Doing something didn't sound interesting – but sitting here and doing nothing sounded boring. I gazed at my reflection in the blank computer screen.

After nearly fifteen minutes of debating what I _could_ do (but didn't want to), I groaned and buried my head in my arms. School had been out for a grand total of two weeks… and I was bored out of my mind.

* * *

_-Maddie_

Science is a data-driven enterprise. We conduct experiments to obtain our data and then use the information we've found to formulate theories. These theories are then tested with more experiments and data. The cycle of science is well established and known around the globe.

Paranormal scientists (ghost hunters), such as myself, have always languished as a 'quasi-science' in the eyes of the world mostly due to the data we collected. It was not based on real-world data… the usual basis for our theories were the millions of stories about things that go bump in the night. It's only been recently that technology has reached the point where it's possible to create paranormal teams around the world – ones that collect real data.

No matter what other people might think about the supernatural, however, I _am_ a scientist. I pride myself on that. Which is why I was sitting at a table in the lab, surrounded by pieces of paper that were covered in bits of information about ghosts that Jack and I had collected over the past few months.

Unfortunately, my mind wasn't on the data at the moment. Instead, my mind kept drifting towards my son. Danny was a perpetual mystery lately and I was worried about him. During his freshman year of high school, I had been inches away from sending him to some kind of therapist: he had been jumpy, anxious, his grades had dropped like a rock, and he'd become secretive. Then, for some strange reason, he'd gotten better. His grades had gone back up and he seemed to have gained some new-found confidence in himself. I ended up ignoring it, merely vowing to keep a closer eye on him in the future.

But lately… I sighed and dropped the paper I'd been holding, rubbing my eyes. Lately, Danny had gotten worse again. I suspected it had something to do with the fact that his friends were all gone for the summer and he was left on his own. He'd gotten overly secretive again, spending too much time in his room. His eyes were constantly flickering around, his muscles tense and anxious.

If anything, I would have thought that he'd be less nervous right now. I know he's noticed the bizarre lack of ghosts – he's mentioned it a few times when we've talked. Danny's always been so frightened of ghosts; he's always running away when one's in the area. I figured he'd be happier without ghosts around. Oddly, he's been getting jumpier instead.

I had no idea what to do with my son. I couldn't _make_ friends for him, not when he's fifteen. What I really needed to do was spend more time with him. This summer would be the perfect time for me to reconnect with my youngest child. There's so much I don't know about him anymore. I've been so wrapped up in my work and Danny's been spending so much time with Sam and Tucker… maybe we just need to sit down and talk and I would be able to figure out what was wrong.

But I had to get this work done. My hands dropped to the table. "I'll get this finished tonight," I whispered, "and spend all of tomorrow with Danny. We'll go for a picnic or something."

I picked up a long list of the various ghosts we'd managed to get readings on over the past four weeks, scanning it quickly. Jack had recently formed a minor obsession with catching 'Ghost B17' – the one that was constantly emptying every box in the garage – so that particular spirit showed up time and again on the list. Another, 'Ghost C3', showed up nearly as often. Of course, there were basically no ghost readings at all for the past two weeks. All the ghosts had vanished.

I was about to set the paper down when a thought struck me. A certain ghost seemed to be missing from the list. Again. I stared at the paper for a moment and searched for the ghost-boy, a.k.a. Danny Phantom, coded into our system as 'Ghost A1'. He was only on the list for the time I'd caught him in the lab and the time Jack had found him asleep on the couch.

Pushing with my feet, I wheeled my chair across the room to a file cabinet. I grabbed the folder that held all the lists of the ghosts we'd encountered and gazed at lists. Jack and I had no records of encountering the ghost-boy on our patrols for nearly two months.

Was he avoiding us?

I shook my head at the thought and dropped the folder back into the cabinet. True, we were ghost hunters that had shot at him in the past, but this particular ghost seemed to be dead set on never coming face-to-face with us. Staying as far from us as possible seemed to be almost an obsession of his. Unlike all of the other ghosts we'd encountered, he'd vanish the moment a human appeared on the scene.

The longest I'd ever even _seen_ Phantom up close was for a brief moment during that fiasco with the mayor. I wrinkled my forehead as I snatched Phantom's file out of the bottom drawer. Grainy pictures were paper-clipped to the folder. The best picture we had of him, a close-up snapshot as he was robbing a bank nearly a year ago, was blurry and hard to make out. I shook my head in amazement as I flipped through the pictures.

Whatever his plan was, Phantom was doing an awesome job of making sure nobody knew what he really looked like. All I really knew about him was that he had white hair, green eyes, looked to be about fifteen, was lean, wiry, and 'handsome' depending on who you talked to. He was a mystery.

I sighed and put his file back. There wasn't anything I could do about it. Apparently the resident ghost was trying his hardest to stay away from the ghost hunters, and I couldn't really blame him. I wasn't going to get a picture of him any time soon – not if Phantom had anything to say about it. That was too bad. I wondered what he actually looked like.

Wheeling my chair back over to the table, I picked up the list again, carefully transferring the information onto our permanent charts. This was going to take awhile. But I _was_ going to finish it. Tomorrow was going to be a Danny day. I glanced up at the clock and flinched, quietly correcting myself when I noticed what time of the night it was. _Today_ was going be a Danny day.

* * *

_-Danny_

My feet scuffed against the floor of the lab and I stormed over to the Ghost Portal. My normal luck when it comes to ghosts seemed to be returning, breaking the 'no ghosts' week I'd been having. Some ghost straight out of the sixties had decided that the city needed to be more 'psychedelic' and had managed to paint nearly three city blocks in headache-inducing colors before I caught him. As the thermos beeped softly to show it was empty, I shook my head sourly. He was yet another powerless spirit that I'd never have to see again.

I unscrewed the thermos from the portal, not paying any attention to what has happening around me. Figuring it was somewhere around two in the morning, I hadn't bothered to stop and look around the lab – everybody had to be asleep. _I _wanted to be asleep. I stifled a yawn and started to turn around to wander upstairs to my warm bed when a net appeared out of nowhere. It wrapped around me and slammed into a wall.

"Ghost." I raised my head despite the sticky webbing of the net yanking my hair. My mom was standing there, odd-looking gun in her hands, studying me carefully.

I tensed, not answering her. This was bad… this was very bad. The _last_ thing I wanted was to be captured by my mother when she was in this weird mood. She might dissect me before I have a chance to explain. Pushing against the net, I struggled for a few seconds, wincing as a handful of my hair parted from my scalp. The net was strong, extremely sticky, and ghost-proof all at the same time.

"What were you doing?" Her voice came from right next to me. I glanced at her through my hair, twisting to try and stay away from her. She was crouched mere feet from the net, an ectogun hanging loose in her hands, watching me through her goggles.

I tried to stretch out my legs and succeeding only in tangling my feet up worse. With a scowl, I stopped struggling for a moment, debating what to do next. I'd spent over a year avidly avoiding my more perceptive and observant parent… and now it looked like I had no choice. I took a deep breath. This would be the first conversation we'd ever had. "Does it matter?" I asked softly, crossing my fingers she wouldn't be able to recognize my voice.

She was silent for a moment. "You look just like…" her whispered voice trailed off before she could finish. Her hand reached out to touch the net, trying to force my head up so she could see my face better.

I winced away from her, cursing silently in my head and twisting my face away from her. This was _exactly_ why I'd been avoiding her. She was bound to recognize me given half the chance. That was a clue to my identity she did _not_ need. "Can I go? Please?"

"What were you scanning for last week when I saw you in the lab?"

I fidgeted my fingers, trying desperately to get them unstuck. "Ghosts," I whispered.

"Why?" she asked. Her voice sounded odd. There was none of the hatred and rancor that usually colored her tone when she talked about me. I shot her a confused look. By this point, she was sitting cross-legged on the floor next to me. The ectogun was sitting her lap.

I hesitated, debating my answer. "I was trying to figure out where the ghosts are."

She nodded, leaning a bit closer and meeting my eyes. I shuffled backwards as good as I could while trussed up in the net – it was decidedly creepy looking her in the face from this close. "Of course you would have noticed the lack of ghosts in the area." She blinked, a startled look crossing her face. "You don't know why they're not haunting Amity Park?"

"Why would I?" I yanked on one of my hands, the sticky net pulling against my hair as I did so.

"You're a ghost too." She tilted her head to the side. "So, what were you doing in the lab this morning?"

This was not going how I'd expected it would. My mother was the 'blast first and ask questions never' kind of person when it came to ghosts. Why was she peppering me with questions? I shifted uncomfortably in the net. "Can you let me go?"

She shook her head. "Answer the question, Phantom."

"I was putting a ghost back in the Ghost Zone."

"Why?" She shot the question at me almost before I had finished answering.

I looked up at her in confusion. Why would she ask something like that? She knew very well why hunters captured ghosts and threw them back into the Zone. "Ghosts don't belong in the human world."

My eyes widened at the surprised look that crossed my mother's face. I _knew_ what she was going to say next. I'd probably just doomed myself. "What about you? If ghosts don't belong in the human world, why are you here?"

There were any number of ways to answer this one. Since saying I was part-human and needed the warmth and food the human world provided was obviously not going to work, I settled for a combination of my, common other excuses. "Ghosts don't like me very much and someone's got to stop them from terrorizing Amity Park. I'm good at it. Can you let me go now?"

She slid closer and I pushed myself farther away. My back bumped against the metal wall and I couldn't stop my mother from drifting to within inches of me. She stared into my eyes, confusion flickering across her features. "Do you know you sound _exactly_ like…"

"Please?" I interrupted, so nervous that my hands were shaking and my voice was squeaking. "Let me go?"

Suddenly she backed away from me, standing up and stalking to the other side of the lab. She grabbed a small scanner and came back over, the device beeping and glowing in the semi-darkness of the basement. "In a minute…" she murmured.

"What?!" The word came out as a gasp. Did she just say she'd let me go? Was she going to dissect me first?

The scanner let out a musical trill and Mom dropped it to her side. "Can you keep a secret, Phantom?"

I was dead silent, unable to decide how to answer that. Which one would get me out of this net and away from this place?

She knelt down, her head tipping to the side as she studied me. "It's uncanny, your resemblance to him," she whispered. Then, louder, she asked me again. "Can you keep a secret?"

Finally I nodded and licked my lips.

"I don't want to hunt you anymore."

I blinked, unable to find something to say to that.

"I haven't been for awhile. Actually," she took a deep breath, "and don't tell Jack this, but I've been wondering if you're not actually helpful." She glanced at me, a small smile trembling at the corners of her mouth.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. My mother _loved_ ghost hunting. For my entire life, all she had wanted was to catch an 'evil' ghost and take it apart. She'd been talking non-stop about catching me and dissecting me for over a year. I sent her a confused and sticky look.

"I haven't been able to figure everything out yet. I don't understand why you attacked the mayor, or why you robbed all those stores, or why you've attacked us… but I can't help wonder about you." Her voice was soft. "Especially now that I've seen you."

I nodded, feeling my hair being pulled by the net.

"Everything inside of me is saying that you're not a ghost I should be hunting. I have no problem hunting other ghosts and talking about dissecting them. Lately, though, every time I think about studying you, I get this strange feeling in my stomach." She was barely whispering by this point, speaking more to herself than to me. "I've kept hunting you because you're so dangerous. You don't really belong in the human world, but maybe you _need_ to be here." She gazed down at her fingers for a quiet moment. "But Jack would be so disappointed if I caught a ghost and then let it go."

"Please let me go," I whispered. I had no idea what was going on. I wanted to get out of here so I could figure this out.

She pulled a small pager-sized box off of her belt, cradling it in her hands. "Promise me something, Phantom."

"What?"

"Promise you'll come back tomorrow so we can talk. I want to understand."

"You'd trust my promise?" I asked, startled.

She looked up, meeting my eyes. "For some reason… yes. I do." Her eyes swimming with confusion, but she was being serious.

I hesitated before I answered. I didn't want to spend any more time around Mom than was absolutely necessary. She was too observant and smart. She'd put clues together and would learn things that I didn't want her figuring out. A lot of damage had been done already. Just in this one face-to-face conversation, my mother was questioning who I was. It was too risky. I shouldn't come back.

But I nodded anyways, cursing myself quietly. I was stepping into extremely dangerous territory. Maybe, just maybe, this would be a good thing. Maybe I could convince her that I shouldn't be hunted at all. Maybe I could get her on my side. Maybe…

She held out the box and pressed a small button, the net dissolving around me. I didn't move as the remains of the net vanished. Mom was tense, one hand on the control and the other hand dropping down to rest on her ectogun. "You'll be back tomorrow?"

"I promise," I whispered before letting myself fall into intangibility and slip through the wall.

Hovering just outside of the lab, I slapped my head with my hand. What the _hell_ was I thinking?


	3. Experiments

_Two Weeks before the Prologue_

* * *

_-_Danny__

Every day for the next two weeks, I showed up in FentonWorks as Phantom to talk. It had taken _hours _of explaining to Mom to get her to stop asking me questions about things that had happened around town over the past year. Then I had been 'introduced' to Dad. He had, of course, spent the first three days with an ectogun in his hand… but he never shot at me. He trusted Mom's opinion of me.

It quickly became apparent that although my parents were at various degrees of trusting me, they were thrilled with all the new information they had at their disposal. During that first week, I think they asked me every question that they had ever wondered. More often than not, my response was a shrug and an 'I don't know'. I'm not a very good source for all things ghostly, even though I knew a _lot_ more than they did.

By the second week of talking, the questions had fallen off. Out of pure lack of other stuff to do, I kept showing up. I hadn't seen a hint of a ghost since that hippie ghost, and it wasn't like I had a lot of friends to make plans with. I usually found an out-of-the-way place and watched what they were doing. Dad, for some reason, took this as a sign that I was interested in what he was doing rather than the fact that I was bored with nothing better to do.

"Unlike most people think, ectoplasm is more like human cells than blood," he commented, holding out a small dish of green goop for my inspection. "If you look at it through a microscope, you can actually see individual cells with the spectral equivalent of nucleuses, mitochondria, ribosomes… everything. Ghosts even have a form of DNA, which is what gives you a specific ectosignature."

I nodded, hoping that I looked a little interested and not as confused as I felt. This sounded too much like that biology class I almost flunked out of.

He kept talking, not looked up at me. "It's the mitochondria that we're really interested in right now. In human cells, mitochondria produce adenosine triphosphate… the human form of energy. We figure that a ghost's version of mitochondria does about the same kind of thing. Except their job is to refine ambient emotional energy into a version of spectral energy your body can use to stay stable."

"Why do you care?" I asked. I hooked my feet around the legs of the bar stool I was perched on and leaned over to study the slimy goo. Apparently, goop is a lot more complicated than I had figured it was.

"Batteries," Dad smiled. "We've got equipment that runs on spectral energy, but now we need a way to power it that's better than using electricity. If we could create a battery made up of ectoplasmic mitochondria…" he trailed off, raising an eyebrow.

I grinned, nodding, actually following his line of thought. "Then you'd have something that could naturally create energy and recharge itself without having to plug anything in. You'd have a ghost battery." I shook my head in surprise. "That's actually really smart."

He was quiet for a moment, studying the sample through the microscope. "Can you go get the centrifuge, Ghost?"

"What?" I tilted my head in confusion, tamping down on a small smile. Dad steadfastly refused to call me 'Phantom'.

"The thing that whirls around in circles with test tubes in it." He twirled his finger around in circles. "Can you bring it over here and plug it in? We need to separate this and get some samples."

I slipped off the chair and flew over to the other side of the lab, picking up the machine and dragging it over to Dad. "This it?" I asked him, holding it awkwardly in my arms. It was big and it was heavy. He nodded, so I set it on the table and plugged it in.

I was heading back to my chair when Dad captured my arm. "Now," he said, "we need some test tubes."

"Wait… you want me to _help_?" I stared at him. Dad _never_ asked for people to help him actually do an experiment. There was the random 'hold something' or 'fetch something'… but never actually doing anything with the experiment. Dad liked to be able to claim complete ownership of anything that went right. I glanced over my shoulder at Mom, who was looking at Dad with the same dumbstruck expression.

"You don't want to help?" he asked, sounding a little hurt. "I thought you were interested."

For a second, I just blinked at him. "Okay…" I said. "Test tubes?"

A huge grin split his face. "The tall, silver cabinet. Top shelf. We're going to need some pipettes too."

* * *

_ _-Danny_ _

I drummed my fingers against the arm of the chair that night, watching my parents out of the corner of my eye. They had spent the entire day down in the lab with Phantom and they were now flipping through the TV channels, trying to settle on something to watch. I couldn't figure out what was up, and it was driving me nuts.

Now, on top of the 'where are the ghosts' mystery, I had the 'why are my parents being so nice to Phantom' mystery. Did they know who I really was? If so, why hadn't they said anything? And why had Dad let me help out with his experiment? Why were they so calm about the whole idea of a ghost being in their lab?

Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

And then there was the question of if they didn't know who I was, should I tell them? They'd apparently accepted Phantom as a good ghost. I don't really have any reason to _not_ tell them. I sighed softly, sinking into the chair, letting my eyes drift back to the screen. Dad had settled on (surprise, surprise) 'Ghost Hunters'.

Thoughts flickered wildly through my head as my parents watched the show. These past few days had been really strange. On top of the fact that my parents were actually accepting Phantom into their lab, there was the fact that I hadn't really had any contact with them as Danny _Fenton_. We sat together at meals, and sometimes we channel surfed together. But other than that… I felt odd talking to them more as Phantom than as Fenton. I don't think I even said two words to them today as Fenton.

I wondered if they ever wondered about me. They probably thought that I was holed up in my room all day, every day. Did they wonder if I was bored? Why didn't they ever ask me to come down and work in the lab? I wondered if they cared.

I gave a start of surprise at that thought. Of _course_ they care, I chided myself. I'm their son. It's just that Phantom is a 'new' thing. My parents treat ghost stuff like little kids treat toys. After a few weeks, the newness will wear off and my parents will stop acting so strangely.

I blew a piece of hair out of my eyes. It was nothing to worry about. This whole thing was just my parents acting normal around a new experiment.

Right?

* * *

_-_Danny__

A few days later, nothing had changed yet. Mom and Dad always sent me huge smiles when I showed up in the lab as Phantom. Sometimes they would take a few minutes to show me how to do something, or ask for my help. I was quickly becoming ensconced in all of their experiments. I even knew how to use the centrifuge.

Mostly, however, my parents were my parents. They got wrapped up in their experiments, pouring over their test results for hours on end. There were times when they would sit together, heads inches apart, talking about things and not paying any attention to me. I probably could have ransacked the lab without them noticing. All that was changing was the fact that I was, slowly but surely, starting to understand what they were saying.

Today happened to be 'scheduled maintenance day'. Dad was running the portal through a bunch of checks, Mom was testing out every other invention in the lab… and I had been regulated to cleaning ectoguns.

"You trust me with the ectoguns?" I had spluttered when they had given me my 'assignment' for the day. I'd gotten two odd looks in return. For a moment, I wasn't sure if they remembered that I'd been on the 'evil ghost' list just a few weeks earlier.

It turns out that taking ectoguns apart and cleaning them is relatively easy. I figured out how to do that part on my own. Putting them back together was proving to be a completely different story.

"Ouch," I hissed when I pinched my finger for the fifth time. I was sure this piece went here, but it was trying to prove me wrong. The pieces just didn't _fit_. I sighed, dropping the remains onto the table.

Suddenly two orange-clad arms appeared over my shoulders, black-gloved fingers picked up the pieces. "Like this." Dad's voice rumbled deep in his chest. He deftly snapped everything into place. I was amazed. I had taken my gloves off nearly twenty minutes ago, trying to blame them for being too bulky. But my dad's fingers were easily twice as big as my fingers had been _in_ those gloves, and he wasn't having a problem. He took the gun back apart and set the pieces down. "Try again."

I bit my lip. Carefully, I slotted the pieces together. I was so focused on the ectogun that I didn't notice Mom coming over to watch. When I got the last piece in, I looked up and was startled to find her standing on the other side of the table. She smiled at me. It was a smile I hadn't seen in a long time. A quiet smile that was filled with pride. "You did it," she said quietly.

Dad ruffled my white hair roughly. "Good job, Ghost."

I smiled vaguely back at him, looking down at the ectogun in my hands. Phantom's fingers were so pale and thin. They shimmered with a translucency that seemed to glow softly. I twirled the gun in them for a few moments.

When I looked up, both of my parents were back on the other side of the lab, back to working on their tests. I sighed, trying to push the picture of my mother's smile out of my mind. But I couldn't. She had been so proud of Phantom for those few minutes. Not of _me_.

Startled at a cool feeling on my cheek, I reached up to brush away the wetness on my face. I set down the ectogun and stared at the pearlescent tear on my finger. Silently, I picked up my discarded gloves and vanished.

* * *

_-_Danny__

That night, dinner was torture. My dad went on and on about the wonderful results he'd gotten with the portal's tests today. We were nearing desert before he stopped to take a breath and let someone else talk. Mom smiled happily. She looked up at me. "Phantom put together an ectogun today," she said slowly.

"So?" I muttered. I knew that. _I_ had put together that stupid ectogun. Not that she knew that.

Mom was silent for a second. "Maybe you can…" she hesitated, then started over. "Danny, I know that you don't like this ghost stuff, but if you want you can come downstairs tomorrow and help."

"Maybe," I said.

"Our ghost would love to show you the ropes!" Dad interjected.

The _ghost_ would show me the ropes. I narrowed my eyes and glared at him. _I've_ only been living here for fifteen years. _Phantom_ had only been here for one. I couldn't quite understand the feelings that were swirling around inside of me. Sadness, frustration, anger… My temper flared. "I'm not too sure _Phantom_ and I would get along," I snarled.

Dad bit into his fudge. Mom watched me, her eyes sparkling oddly. Finally, she simply picked up her plate and walked over to put it in the dishwasher. "Sweetie…" she said.

"Drop it." I almost knocked my chair over in an attempt to get out of the kitchen as fast as I could. "I'm fine."

I stormed up to my room and locked the door. It was stress, I told myself. Stress from not knowing what my ghostly enemies are planning, stress from being around my parents without them learning who I was, stress from being… well, bored. Who would have ever thought that I would long for everybody that had ever known me to pick up the nearest gun and point it at my head? I had to be frustrated and angry because I was stressed. I was _not_ feeling like this because I was starting to feel a little jealous…

Stomping down on that thought, I turned on my computer and opened the game that was growing into my least-favorite pastime. Hours upon hours of playing 'Doomed!' with nothing else to do had left me feeling rather ambivalent towards the game. But as I sat, watching it load, I knew it would be incredibly helpful right now. I dredged up every angry thought I could find and prepared to blast the other players into digital dust.

_Boom_. Dad takes time out of his tests to help Phantom.

_Blam._ Never me. What, am I not worth it?

_Zap._ And then, they can't _not_ talk about it at dinner.

_Zoom!_ Don't they notice that it bugs me? On that note…

_BANG!_ Why haven't they noticed that _I'm_ Phantom?

_Boom._ They spend enough time around _him_.

_Ba-Bang!_ Maybe they aren't spending enough time with _me_.

_Zap!_ Don't they even care? Can't they put aside their stupid ghost obsession for ten minutes to do something with _me_?

_Whap._ Maybe _Phantom_ should be their son, not me.

_Bang._ Maybe then they'd be happy.

_Ka-Boom_. …maybe then I'd be happy…

With a snarl, I snapped the computer off without bothering to log out of the game first. Enough of that. I stalked over to my bed and collapsed onto the covers, curling up into a tiny ball.

Blowing everything up was supposed to make me feel better.

Why is it that I feel worse?

That was when I made my pledge. No more Phantom. I wasn't going to go down to the lab. If my parents didn't have Phantom, they would go back to normal. Normal wasn't perfect, but it had to be better than this messed-up situation.

Without Phantom, they'd just go back to normal.

They had to.

* * *

_-_Maddie__

"Jack," I said quietly as he helped me pick up the dishes after dinner, "I'm worried about Danny."

My husband nodded and set a handful of plates into the dishwasher. "He seems angry."

I smiled a little. "He's a bit more than angry, Jack. He'd been so quiet lately, locking himself in his room and never coming out, sleeping a lot, refusing to be part of the family…" I shook my head dismally. Jazz might be the psychologist of the family, but I'd taken a few courses in college as well. I knew the classics signs of depression when I saw them. I'd been keeping a close eye on him, hoping it was just something he'd snap out of… but I was slowly getting very worried for my only son.

"It's probably just a phase."

"Jack, we _need _to do something with Danny. He's obviously bored. I don't want him to get into something bad because he's got nothing else to do." I set the cups on the counter. "We should set up some kind of family outing. Maybe we can do a vacation."

Jack glanced over at me. "But we can't leave the experiments right now."

"I was going to spend time with him a few weeks ago, but then Phantom showed up and I got so busy. But it shouldn't matter if we're busy… Danny needs someone to talk to. A friend," I persisted.

"Our friendly ghost?" Jack said with a raised eyebrow and a quiet grin.

"Do you trust him with our son?" I stared down at the dirty cups, slowly rearranging them on the counter so I didn't have to look up. This was a topic I wasn't sure I wanted to talk about yet. There was no way I could explain why I already trusted the ghost as surely as I did. He was quickly becoming indistinguishable from Sam or Tucker: more family than anything else.

"Mads," he muttered, coming over to wrap his arms around me. "What's wrong?"

"For someone who's usually really dense, you're too observant sometimes." I shot him a look.

"I'm just easily distracted," he said with a wink. "What's wrong?"

"Do you trust Phantom?"

Jack was silent for a moment. "For some reason, I think so." He sighed.

"Do you think it's because he looks so much like our son?" I leaned back against him, letting his warm bulk hold me up.

"He looks like Danny?" Jack's tone was laced with true surprise. For a few seconds, I could almost hear his mind working as he pictured the two of them together. Then he laughed. "You're right, Mads. They look almost identical. Strange."

"I wonder why."

Jack shrugged, his whole body shifting against mine. "There could be a million reasons."

I ran a hand through my hair. "They're just so alike. They look the same, they sound the same… they even act the same sometimes. If I didn't know better, I'd say they were the same person."

Jack chuckled. "Mads, that's ridiculous. Danny's not a ghost. We just saw him at dinner."

"I know." I stood up, letting Jack get back to washing dishes. As I wandered around the kitchen, I kept glancing up the stairs. I couldn't worry about Phantom right now – deep in my soul I knew that there was something wrong with my son. Now I just needed to figure out what to do about it.

* * *

_-_Danny__

The first day of my pledge wasn't so bad. I sulked in my room quite effectively for the entire day. Mom and Dad didn't bother me, except for around noon when she knocked on my door saying that lunch was ready.

The second day was impossible. I kept catching myself at the top of the stairs, wanting to go down and see what was going on. My fingers itched to be doing something useful. But I couldn't. Danny 'Fenton' was afraid of ghosts and didn't go into the lab. Danny 'Phantom' wasn't going to be making an appearance. I had made that decision. Which meant I couldn't go down to the lab.

It took all of my willpower to stay out of the basement that day.

That third day didn't go nearly as well.

I was in the lab by ten o'clock. As Phantom.

"Ghost!" Dad bellowed when I shimmered into view next to him.

I smiled vaguely. "What's up?"

He pulled me over to the rack of lab tests and began to spout off a long stream of babble about what had been happening the past few days. I didn't understand a word of it. But I couldn't help the small bubble of happiness that was brewing in my stomach. It was a traitorous feeling – I didn't want to _enjoy _this. I wanted to be mad at them for ignoring me. Well… part of me.

Dad kept his arm around me, one hand on my shoulder, leaning close so that I could feel his bulk next to me. "So we're redoing test fourteen, see if we can't clear up the results a little bit," he concluded. I looked at me, waiting for my response.

"I didn't understand a word of that," I replied.

He broke into bellows of laughter. "At least you're honest, son. Too bad Danny's not down here too."

Dad walked away, but I was standing shock still, going over his words, an odd feeling squirming in my stomach. After a few seconds of total silence, I ran. I soared over the city. My hair slicked back, my eyes burned from the wind, and my ears rang. But however fast I pushed myself, I could still hear his words.

That was the day that Phantom had officially replaced Danny as the Fenton's son.

* * *

_-_Danny__

That whole next week, I avoided them as Danny Fenton whenever possible. When I was human, I spent most of it locked in my room, playing video games on my own. I only snuck down for food during the night. My parents spent their time in the lab. They didn't bother me, I didn't bother them.

All throughout the week, my nervousness over where all the ghosts were was growing. For a long time, worries about them had settled into a cold finger in the pit of my stomach. Now, for some reason, they were growing again. I kept finding myself flitting out of the house for random patrols of the scarily quiet town. I was glancing over my shoulder at shadows. I almost – _almost – _talked myself into going into the Ghost Zone alone to search for them.

Thankfully, I'm not that stupid or suicidal. The ghosts had to planning something and they were _all_ in the Ghost Zone. Going _there_ was a twelve on the idiotic scale of one to ten.

And no, I'm not paranoid.

Of course, I couldn't stay away my parents completely during this time. Every day, I wandered into the lab to help them out with their experiments as Phantom. Every day I watched my parents happily work away in the lab for an hour or two. Every day, this weird, cold, boiling feeling in my stomach grew slightly when they talked to me… but not to _me_.

Why didn't they storm upstairs and _demand_ that I come out of my room and act like a human being? Did they _really _not care?

"Maddie," I asked one day, "can you answer a question for me?" I twirled the chair I was sitting on as fast as I could. Mom's blue jumpsuit whipped past over and over.

"You're making me dizzy," she murmured. "Stop the spinning and I'll answer anything you'd like."

My feet skidded on the floor as I let the chair slow. "Why isn't Danny ever down here?" I glanced up at her, looking into her startled eyes for a moment before I sent the chair spinning again. I couldn't look at her while she answered.

For a long moment, I didn't think she had heard me. I stopped the chair to see her gazing at the ceiling with an odd look in her eye. "Danny…" she trailed off, then her eyes turned towards me. "Danny's been having a tough summer."

I nodded, swiveling the chair aimlessly from side to side and staring down at my feet. "Maybe he's bored."

She watched me before quietly setting down the invention she was working on and turning to look at me. "Have you ever talked to my son?"

I shook my head. I technically talk to myself all the time, but I figured that didn't count.

"I'm worried about him," she said softly. "He won't come out of his room, he's always so angry lately, he doesn't want to do anything... I'm not sure what to do with him right now." She glanced up at me before flickering a sad smile in my direction. "But it's not your problem. We'll get it all figured out."

"Maybe you should make him do something. Get him out of his room?" I didn't take my eyes off of my shoes. I had no idea where these words were coming from. I had no idea why they struck a chord so deeply down inside of me. More than _anything_, I wanted her to do just what I was suggesting.

Mom fiddled with the invention sitting on the table, a painful expression on her face. "I don't…" I risked a glance up at her, wincing away from the frustrated tears in her eyes. There was an almost hopeful tinge to her voice when she spoke next. "You might be right… he's probably lonely. Maybe you could go talk to him for awhile?"

A cold feeling boiled up inside of me. That was _not_ the answer I wanted to hear. I didn't know for sure what I wanted her to say, but I knew that wasn't it. "I don't think he'd listen to me."

"Oh," she whispered, turning back to her experiment. I watched her for bit as she stared down into the gelatinous mess, not really doing anything with it. Her mind seemed to be off in some other world.

I thought about telling her to go upstairs and yell at me. I contemplated just turning human and getting the whole thing over with. I pondered screaming at her to stop ignoring me and _do something_.

But I didn't.

I just faded away.

* * *

_-_Danny__

The next day I walked quietly down the steps. As a human.

I silently sat down on the bottom step and watched my parents work. By this point, having been down in the lab every day for nearly a month, I knew exactly what they were doing. Dad was running some tests for that ghost battery idea of his – not that it was working any better than it ever had before. Mom was putting some finishing touches on the latest ghost invention (one I'd helped develop): a tiny ghost-detecting robotic fly. My idea was to make dozens of them and scatter then around Amity Park, that way we'd have some sort of amorphous ghost-detection grid.

I tried one last time, rather unsuccessfully, to convince myself that this was in no way influenced by my steadily growing paranoia over where the hell all the ghosts had vanished to and what they were going to do when they reappeared.

For the first time in weeks, Sam and Tucker crossed my mind. They would be a definite help in the solution to the vanishing ghosts mystery. A small smile crossed my face as I thought about their reaction when I told them that I was _helping_ my parents invent ghost weapons. They hadn't been able to get in contact with me for a few weeks, which was depressing, but I kind of understood. They had lives too… I wasn't the center of the universe.

"Danny?"

I glanced over at Mom. She was looking at me with a rather weird expression on her face. Probably the last place she'd ever expected to see me was in the lab. I smiled at her.

"What's up?" she asked, coming over to sit next to me. "Something wrong?"

I shrugged. "I was just bored."

She reached up and ruffled my hair a bit. "I'm glad you're here, Danny. We've missed you."

"Yeah, I bet," I whispered under my breath. If they missed me so much, why hadn't they said anything up until now? Silently, I chided myself for thinking that. My parents weren't ignoring me on purpose. They were just overly involved in whatever they were doing. "What are you working on?"

"A new spin on our ghost detectors," she said with a smile, "that way we can track ghosts all over Amity Park." She hesitated. "Phantom actually did a lot of the design. He's a lot smarter than I figured he'd be."

I sighed, feeling that cold, bubbling feeling in my stomach clench a fist around my heart. Yet another compliment that wasn't really directed towards me. "Really?"

She nodded. "He's actually nice once you get to know him. He's a good kid." She was gazing down at her fingers, flicking glances in my direction. "Maybe you could talk to him, keep him company some day."

I fought to keep my eyes from rolling. She had suggested the same thing to Phantom yesterday. "Maybe."

There was an awkward silence between us. It was obvious Mom didn't know what to say to me. I had no real idea of what I wanted to say to her either. We were sitting so close together, actually touching, but there was a brick wall separating us. Impossibly high, impossibly thick, and growing more and more impossible to break down with each passing second.

Mom tapped her fingers against her knees, searching for something to say. "Phantom…"

"I don't want to talk about him," I interrupted sourly. Just hearing that name… _my _name… was sending weird trickles of emotion through me. I didn't want to hear my mother ever say that name again. She was _my_ mother – not Phantom's.

"Gah," I sighed, rubbing my temples as I finally understood these feelings. It really was jealousy. I was _jealous_ of my ghost half and frustrated that my parents couldn't see it. I was angry that they hadn't figured out the connection between us. Add that to the top of being stressed over the lack of ghosts and the long hours of having nothing to do, I was about ready to snap.

"All right," she whispered, rubbing my back in small circles. "Your head hurts?"

I shot her a small smile. "Not really. I just thought of something."

"Everything's going to be fine, Danny. You'll see." She smiled at me, trying to get me to smile back. "Sam and Tucker will be home in a few weeks and everything will go back to normal."

I contemplated that. Sam and Tucker _would_ be home soon. For some reason, that didn't bring any sort of happiness into my head. Any good thoughts of them were hidden beneath the veil of emotions that was clouding my mind. I wondered what they would think when they found out that I was jealous of _myself_. I wondered how much screaming they would do when they learned how much time I was spending in the lab as a ghost.

At that moment, having Sam and Tucker come home didn't sound like an entirely wonderful idea.

I closed my eyes and tried to keep myself from bashing my head against the wall for thinking that. I _wanted_ my friends to come home. My parents really _did_ care about me. Why were those darker thoughts flooding into my mind?

"Danny?" she asked quietly.

I looked over at her, my vision blurry. I blinked a few times, startled to be clearing tears out of my eyes. What was wrong with me? Why was I having those horrible thoughts and why were my emotions playing these weird games with me? I went from being jealous to frustrated to _crying_? Why?

"Danny!" my father bellowed from just a few feet away. I practically levitated in surprise. Mom had been speaking so quietly…

"Jack," Mom admonished, snaking her arm around my shoulders and giving me a half-hug.

"Sorry," he said – still louder than he needed to, but a lot quieter. "You've got to come see this." Without further ado, he grabbed my wrist and practically dragged me across the lab to his workstation. On the microscope's screen, the small globs that were supposedly some sort of spectral mitochondria were shivering and shifting.

"Phantom," I shivered a little when he said that name, "and I have been working on this experiment to create a ghost battery. Look!" He tapped the screen with one of his huge fingers. "It's been nearly two days, and the things are still alive! Phantom," at the name I shifted a little away from him, my wrist still firmly caught in his grasp, "didn't think we were ever going to pull it off. He said that we wouldn't ever be able to keep something dead, well, alive." My eyes narrowed and a little cold bubble burst in my chest – _I _had said that.

"I can't wait until Phantom comes back!" He was looking excitedly around the room, ignoring me. I was glowering at the small screen, more bubbles of frustration popping inside of me with his every word. "He and I have so many experiments that we need to do! I hope that Phantom…"

That was it; I couldn't take it any more. "I hate Phantom!" I suddenly yelled, ignoring the startled look in my father's eyes and yanking my hand out of his grasp. I knew I was acting childish, but I needed to get this frustrated rage out of me. I wanted to throw something, destroy things, terrorize… but I didn't. I settled for an inarticulate scream of fury. Everything they did was with _Phantom_, not with their own _son_. Why couldn't they see me for once?

"Danny!" Mom snapped, "Stop this right now."

"Why?" I seethed. "All I ever hear is ghosts, ghosts, ghosts, ghosts, and more ghosts. And now it's only Phantom. Why don't you go and _adopt_ him."

She shook her head. "You are being ridiculous, Danny."

"You don't know the half of it," I muttered darkly.

I could see it in her eyes. She wanted to say something, anything. She wanted to make me feel better. I crossed my arms and backed away. I didn't _want_ to feel better. I was miserable and lonely and that's exactly how I wanted to feel.

"Leave me alone!" I snarled when she took a step towards me, her hand raised.

She stopped, tears sparkling in her eyes. "Danny," she murmured.

I didn't want to listen. Wrapping myself in my frustrated anger, I turned and stormed out of the kitchen. "Just leave me alone," I said, not caring if she heard me or not.

Reaching my room, I sank onto my bed and glared at the door, daring it to open and for my blue jump-suited mother to walk through. I wanted her to stomp into the room and yell at me for acting like a five-year-old. I wanted her to open that door and hug me and tell me everything was going to be alright. I wanted her to leave me alone to wallow in my misery.

After a few minutes, my rock-like glare softened and my gaze fell to the hands sitting in my lap. Despite my best efforts, my anger was draining away, leaving something odd in its place. As tears trickled down my cheeks, the last of that heated emotion vanished. It left me with nothing inside. It was a dark, blank shadow that curled up in my gut and swirled around my heart. I could feel it inside of me; hollow and tiring.

It was scary, this lack of feeling. It made me wish for that hint of anger again… the frustrated loneliness that was swallowing me earlier. For a second, I tried to will up those emotions and that feeling of life. But in the end, I was too empty and tired to care.

So I just closed my eyes.

* * *

_ _-Jack_ _

I watched my son stomp his way up the stairs. I couldn't quite figure out why Danny had come down into the lab in the first place, but I had noticed the odd look that had been on his face when he'd first come down here. He'd glanced around at all the experiments almost like he knew what they were about. That was silly, of course, because Danny hadn't been down in the lab in weeks.

For a second I stared at the ceiling, wondering if I should go after him. He'd seemed really upset – a lot more than I'd put down as normal teenage behavior. I had the nagging feeling that the father-son bonding book I'd been trying to read would say I should go say something adult-ish. I've never been very good at being an adult, but I'd be willing to give it a try.

I glanced over at Maddie. She was biting her lip and watching the stairs with an anxious look in her eyes. It looked like she was about to cry. "Mads," I said softly. She looked up at me. "He'll be alright."

"Are you sure?" she asked. She walked up to me and wrapped her arms around me, leaning her cheek against my chest. "I feel so awful, Jack. I promised that I'd do something with him, a picnic or go to a movie or something, and I keep putting it off. He's probably so lonely… And I don't know what to do…"

Patting her on the back, I whispered, "We'll figure something out. We're good at figuring things out." I smiled down at her, fighting back a surprised flinch when I saw the tears in her eyes. I touched her chin, looking her in the eyes. "I promise."

A small smile touched her face. "I love you, Jack."

I hugged her tightly to me, my mind running around in circles. How in the world was I going to help my son? I had no idea what was wrong with him.

* * *

_-_Danny__

I don't really remember the next few days. I spent it in a blur of dazed sleep and waking dreams. Nothing had color, nothing had life. I drifted from my computer to the TV to the bed and back to the computer. I didn't want to do anything. In the end, I think I may have settled for sitting by the window and staring at nothing.

The anger never came back. The hatred was gone for good. I couldn't feel anything. The desire to feel those harsh emotions was just a distant memory. It was better this way – this blank slate. I didn't have to think about anything.

I do remember one dinner. I had been dragged out of my room and made to sit at the kitchen table. Pushing my food around on my plate, I never said a word. I spent most of the dinner wondering when the last time I had eaten something was. I spent the rest of it deciding I didn't really care. I wasn't hungry.

Dad talked throughout most of dinner, as usual. He was worried about Phantom. Apparently Phantom hadn't been to the lab the past few days. I couldn't muster up the energy for either an eye roll or a sour glare in his direction.

Finally I was excused from dinner, even though I hadn't eaten anything. "Danny?" Mom said before I could get out of the chair.

I looked over in her direction. I tipped my head slightly to the side, waiting.

"Are you okay?"

I contemplated that for a second. No, I decided. I wasn't okay. A small shiver of surprise traveled up my back at the lack of emotion this revelation caused. I wasn't okay… and I didn't care. I didn't care about me, I didn't care about the missing ghosts, and I really didn't care what my parents thought of my alter-ego. In the end, I just nodded to answer my mom's question. Explaining why I wasn't okay would take too much work. I wanted to go lie down in my bed.

She came over and looked me straight in the eyes. "You sure?" she asked softly.

I nodded again, standing up.

"I'm here. If you want to talk," she said.

I walked slowly back up the steps. Behind me, Mom was talking to Dad. She was telling him how she missed my smile. I hesitated in front of the mirror at the top of the steps. Gazing into its murky depths, I attempted to smile.

I sighed. I looked even worse with that fake smile than without it. Pushing my hands against my eyes, I decided that I needed to make a plan to get over this.

Later. For now I was going to go take a nap.

* * *

_-_Danny__

I stepped out of the shadows of the lab and walked over to mom's side. She looked up, brightening when she saw me. "Phantom." She smiled.

I pulled the comforting blanket of that which is "Phantom" around me. I let his confident, powerful personality take over, but even that couldn't banish the pervasive emptiness completely. I smiled slightly at her. I knew that it didn't reach my eyes. "What's up?"

"Where have you been?"

"Busy." I looked around the lab.

Mom walked over a put a hand on my arm. She looked at me carefully. "Are you okay?"

I felt a cold finger travel down my neck. She had asked me the exact same question in the exact same tone last night at dinner. "I'm fine," I answered. Her eyes never left mine, as if she didn't quite believe me.

"Ghost!" Dad called enthusiastically as he tramped down the stairs. He grabbed my arm and yanked me across the lab. "The test results on the cellular ectoplasm are done!" Dad dumped me into a chair and yanked out a tray full of Petri dishes to shove under my nose.

Mustering up a smile, I gazed down at the goop in the trays. "Wonderful," I said, trying to sound excited. I must have failed miserably because Mom's hand dropped onto my shoulder.

"Are you sure you're okay?" she asked.

"I'm just tired, is all." I looked away from her, my breath catching in my throat. This is where she confronts me about lying, and demands to know what's wrong. She'll force me to tell her everything. Deep inside of me, the hollowness curled a bit deeper, waiting.

"Okay," she said softly, backing off. I glanced over my shoulder, eyes widening in surprise.

"That's it? Just okay?" The words slipped out of my mouth before I thought about it. I cringed, waiting for the answer.

She smiled at me. "You're not my son, if you say you're okay, then…" she trailed off, but her eyes conveyed the concern she felt for me. "But if you wanted to talk, I'm here for you."

As she turned away, another question flew out from between my lips. "What if I _was_ your son?"

Mom hesitated, looking down at the invention in her hands. "You're not," she finally said. "And you won't ever be."

I spun around in the chair, letting the world spin crazily for a while. It's a real shame that ghosts can't get dizzy. It might have chased away the empty feeling for a few minutes. _Besides_, I thought harshly, _that's not why I asked. I don't want you to adopt me. Would you just say 'okay' if you knew I was your son?_

Suddenly, my spinning was stopped. Mom was standing right in front of me, staring into my emerald eyes, holding the chair firmly in her hands. "Phantom," she said softly, "you're a good kid. But you've got your own parents, and you're a ghost. You're not ever going to be part of my family."

I blinked up at her. "I know," I muttered darkly. The blackness in the pit of my stomach spread a bit farther. For some reason, the idea that she could never accept me as part of her family didn't hurt as much as I though it should have. Maybe it was that soul-eating shadow locked inside of me.

We gazed at each other for a moment. I could feel the crushing ache of her pronouncement like a distant bell against my brain. Her eyes glittered in the lights from the nearby Ghost Portal. "Are you going to be okay?" she asked quietly.

"Yeah," I whispered. I wrenched my eyes away from hers and studied my fingers instead. "I'm good."

She backed up a step. "I've got an experiment all ready to run, do you want to help?"

I glanced up at her for just a moment before staring down at my fingers again. Mom was smiling at me, wanting to make me feel better. I sighed. The tired, hollowness was creeping back through me – not even Phantom could hold it off forever. I didn't want to be down here anymore. "No, I have to go."

Her hand touched my shoulder. "Come back tomorrow when you're feeling better, alright?"

I nodded distantly, then vanished.

* * *

_-_Maddie__

I couldn't really focus on my experiment after Phantom left. For decades I'd been under the impression that ghosts didn't really feel emotions; they just were echoes of life and felt just the faintest reverberations of our emotions. But then I'd looked into his eyes…

The small test tube slipped out of my fingers and rolled across the table. I grabbed for it before it could fall on the floor and carefully examined it for cracks as I mentally chastised myself. Why was I feeling this way about Phantom? Yes, there was no doubt that I'd come to see the young ghost as more than just a glob of post-human consciousness, but he was just a ghost. I shouldn't have any more connection to him than I had to one of Jazz's friends.

I'd only known him for a few weeks, I argued sourly and carefully measured out some saline acid solution. He couldn't have any hold over me. There was no way he'd worked his way into my heart in such a short time. I was a scientist and he was my subject – that was it.

But I knew that wasn't true. When I'd looked into his eyes just before he'd disappeared, my own heart had screamed at me to do _something_. I'd wanted to hold him and comfort him and take back everything I'd said that had made him look so defeated. That was no reaction a scientist would give a subject… it was even barely the reaction of a woman to a hurt child. The intensity of the emotion that had gripped on me was more like a mother to her son.

Was it possible that I'd started to see Phantom as one of my own children? He looked so much like Danny that maybe I was…

I shook my head sharply to get the thought out of my head. Focusing on the titration, I tried stop thinking about Phantom. I was _not_ his mother and I needed to say what I'd said. He'd been hurt, but he'd get over it. Next time I saw him I'd make sure he was alright.

"Mads," Jack said softly, jerking me out of my musings. I looked down at the beaker and noted that it had lost its pinkish color long ago. I'd ruined it. Biting back a sigh, I glanced up at my husband. He was watching me with concern in his expressive eyes. "You okay?"

I nodded. "I'm fine, I was just thinking."

A grin flickered onto his face. "I've been thinking too!" he proclaimed as if it was a huge coincidence. "I think I've figured out what to do about Danny."

My head skittered in a new direction, causing my heart to skip a beat. Danny. My depressed and angry son. "What?"

"He should come down and help tomorrow, like Phantom's been doing."

I blinked at him in confusion. "How will that help? He hates being down here. He made that more than clear yesterday."

Jack nodded, his grin never fading. "I figure that Phantom always has fun down here, and you've got to admit that Phantom and Danny seem a lot alike, so Danny'll have fun down here too. We've just got to force him down here long enough for him to realize it."

I bit back a small smile at Jack's simple explanation. That was so like him – everything had uncomplicated reasoning and the simplest of solutions. What fixed one thing would fix another. Although he _was_ right about the fact that Phantom and Danny having a lot in common, I wasn't too sure that Danny would find working in the lab nearly as interesting as Phantom did. "He's fifteen, Jack. We can't _force_ him to come down here."

"Sure we can! I bet I can still pick him up and carry him down here. Besides, I've even got an experiment all set up for him to help with," Jack babbled on, "with those energized mitochondrial cells we created a few days ago. I think we can get them to hold charge this time."

"That sounds like fun." I picked up my beaker full of neutralized ectoplasmic alkalines and walked over to dump it into the sink. "Yeah, that sounds like it just might work," I whispered to myself. "At least it'll get Danny out of his room."

I brightened slightly. Danny wasn't going to talk to us, but there was a chance that Phantom would show up tomorrow. Maybe Danny would open up to someone his own age.

As I pulled a beaker of glowing liquid out of a warming drawer, a snort of pure disbelief made it out of me. Who would have believed that I'd _want_ a ghost to be talking to my son?

* * *

_-_Danny__

I wandered downstairs later that night, a half-thought to get something to eat crossing my mind. Curled up together on the couch in the living room, my parents were watching some movie. I hesitated in the doorway, watching them. Mom was leaning against Dad with a contented smile on her face, the lights from the TV making her eyes glitter.

I just stood there, gazing across a picture of the perfect family. They were happy with their lives. Their wonderfully human, normal lives. A life that would never accept a ghost.

Deep down, underneath the darkness invading my tired mind, I knew that it wasn't really true. If they _knew_ that I was Phantom, they would accept me. But at the time, I couldn't fathom the difference. Mom had said that she never would let Phantom be part of her perfect family, and that pronouncement was still echoing through me head.

I closed my eyes, curling my arms around my stomach as I listened to animated sounds of the movie. For a brief heartbeat, the hollow feeling retreated, my mind churning back up to gear. The pain and the ache of everything that was happening slammed into my brain. Chocking back a small cry, I glanced back up at my parents.

Why can't you see my pain? Why didn't you follow me yesterday and force me to tell you want's wrong? Why won't you help me?

The room was silent except for the crashings of the movie and a brief chortle from my dad. Emotions roiled through me, thrilling and painful after the days of deadness. Why don't you care? Why don't you notice me, standing here?

My mouth opened to talk, wanting to spill all these emotions out. I wanted nothing more than to be done with this, to be back to my old self. I wanted to be happy again. I wanted to smile, I really did. My throat clogged up with the desire to _feel_ again, to truly be alive.

For that moment, I was going to tell them everything. For that moment, I didn't care whether or not they would accept me; I just wanted to not feel so tired anymore. For that moment, the world stood still.

But then the emptiness was back, swirling in my mind. The depressing, heavy feeling returned, closing my mouth. The blackness invaded me more thoroughly then ever. Words died on my tongue.

I'm fifteen; I can handle it on my own. I don't need their help. Glancing once more over at the picture-perfect family that would never accept me, I turned away. I'll think of something. I'll get over this.

Behold the price of silence.


	4. End Game

_Three Days before the Prologue_

* * *

_ _Danny_ _

"Honey," Mom said at breakfast the next morning, "you're going to work in the lab with us today."

I opened my mouth to talk, but she beat me to it.

"Now, I know you don't like all this ghost stuff, but we're worried about you spending so much time locked in your room by yourself. It's not healthy."

Silently, I stared down at my waffles, wondering. I didn't really want to work down in the lab, but a tiny corner of the hollowness retreated at the thought of actually doing something with my parents. _Me_ doing something… not _Phantom_.

"We've got a great experiment all set up," she went on, apparently not noticing the strange expression on my face as I grappled with the odd desire to actually run to the lab and work next to them. "We've been doing some work with cellular ectoplasm, and we need to find out if it is a viable alternative to the electrically energized ectoplasm with use in our weapons." She turned and sent me a sharp look with one raised eyebrow. "By the way, you don't have an option. You are _going_ to come down with us today."

"Alright," I muttered, trying my hardest not to sound slightly excited about the idea of spending the day with my parents. As the thought settled into my mind, the darkness retreated a bit more, and the smallest of smiles filtered through the tiredness in my mind and settled onto my face.

She smiled at me. "Finish your breakfast and meet us downstairs, okay sweetie?"

I nodded as she dropped her plate into the sink and headed downstairs to join Dad. I pushed my partly-eaten waffles around my syrupy plate for a few moments before standing up and dumping them into the trash. I really wasn't hungry. Setting my plate into the kitchen sink, I stared out into the summer day.

For a quiet moment, I leaned against the counter and watched the people strolling by on the street in the sunlight. Their contented looks seemed almost alien to me. To them, most likely, this was a wonderful summer. Nobody had tried to take over the world, kidnap anybody, or go on an obsessive rampage through town.

They were happy.

I shook my head, finally turning around to stare at the door that led into the Fenton laboratory. It was an absolutely beautiful summer day with no ghosts on the horizon and no worries. But I couldn't muster up even a small smile that felt anywhere near real.

Finally, with a shrug, I pushed away from the counter and headed downstairs. For the first time ever, Danny _Fenton_ was going to do an experiment with his parents.

* * *

_ _Danny_ _

I sat down in my normal chair without even thinking about it, glancing up at Dad. He looked at me weirdly for a long few seconds before shrugging and grinning. "You ready, Danny?"

"What are we doing?" I asked, even though I knew very well what we were doing. By this point, I could probably have run the experiment by myself.

"We're going to run some tests on these spectral mitochondrial samples. If our theory holds true, then we should be able to charge them with energy and then be able to harvest it back again after a few minutes." Dad pushed a pair of gloves over towards me and dropping into his own chair. "Should be easy."

I nodded vaguely, my eyes flickering over the samples Dad had carted over. In this weird, hollow state, I felt kind of detached from the world. Yanking on my gloves, I tapped my finger on the tabletop and waited.

He set one of the samples in front of me and dropped the basket of nine-volt batteries between us. "Watch, Danny, and be amazed." He grabbed two small wires, stripped the plastic sheathes off the ends, and then fished a battery out of the basket. Carefully he held an end of each wire to the battery and stuck the other two ends into the goop.

Nothing happened.

I quietly raised an eyebrow, not really surprised. Ectoplasm is a wonderful conductor of _spectral_ energy… but acted like a horrible electrical conductor. We'd figured that out _weeks_ ago. I grabbed two wires of my own and stripped them, holding the ends to the terminals of the small battery. The only difference was that I twisted the other ends of the wires together, completing the circuit. I then stuck the end of the triangle-shape the wires made into the ectoplasm. Volts raced through the wires, the greenish goo drawing in the power and starting to glow.

"Danny…" my dad trailed off, looking at me with that weird expression on his face. "Where'd you learn to do that?"

Shrugging, I pulled the wires back out of the ectoplasm and dropped the battery onto the table. If I'd been feeling more like myself, I might have grown pale at the thought of giving away this big of a clue to my identity. As it was, I just crossed my arms, set them on the table, and rested my chin on them, staring at the glowing dish of goop.

"Um…" He seemed really off balance, glancing from me to the experiment a number of times. "Now we need to… we need to time it." He thrust a stopwatch at me. "Five minutes, okay?"

I blinked down at the stopwatch expressionlessly. "Okay."

Starting the stopwatch and watching the seconds flicker past, I sighed. Was I happy right now? Sad? No words really seemed to apply. _Apathetic_, maybe, with a large dose of tired and a tiny bit of frustration. I glanced over at my mom – she was carefully studying a sample under a microscope. A satisfied grin was firmly fixed onto her face.

I really did want to get over this… whatever this was. I couldn't ever remember being this exhausted and uncaring, and it was draining. It was tiring being this hollow and it was frankly depressing watching my parents be worried about me all the time. Everything was so much better when they could just exist to run their experiments and trust that the world would turn without their involvement. I wished I could just wave a magic wand and get suddenly better.

"Time," I said softly when the stopwatch finally beeped at me, drawing me out of my silent reverie. Stifling a yawn, I let my eyes drift almost closed.

"Here," Dad mumbled and handed me a small meter with a bunch of wires sticking out. "See if you can draw out the energy, okay?" He flipped through the directions, not seeming to notice the confused look growing on my face. He pointed to a few dials and wires, quickly explaining the reason for them.

Setting the device down on the table, he turned around to get back to his own experiment. "Um… Dad?" I asked cautiously. He glanced over his shoulder at me. "Can you show me that again?"

"Which part?" He stood up and walked over to me, resting his arm on the back of my chair.

I picked up the strange device, fighting down another yawn. "All of it."

"You didn't get any of it?" He sounded almost hurt and he grabbed the wire-covered invention.

"I've never done this before," I whispered, feeling the faintest tinge of irritation growing in my stomach. "I don't know what I'm doing."

"Like this," he said, showing me how to do the experiment for a second time at full speed. My brain, struggling to stay awake and process just normal stuff, didn't have a chance to keep up. Before, I would have caught on to most of it. But today…

I shook my head, watching the frustration build on my dad's face. Of course, he was used to his little lab rat who picked things up right away. Yes, that lab rat was _me_, but I couldn't concentrate with this strange cold feeling inside of me.

Quietly, as I glanced up into Dad's eyes, I reached for that cold spot in my mind. _It'd all be over in a split-second_, I thought as I traced around it with a mental finger. _I'd be Phantom and they'd… they'd… _A million thoughts burst into my head. _They'd accept me, they'd reject me, they'd love me anyways, they'd ask me a million questions, they'd ground me…_

_And all it would take would be one small thought. And all this would be over._

My whole body trembled for a second at that thought. This torturous hollowness could be over and done with.

"Pay attention, Danny," my father rumbled, grabbing the pieces one last time. "Phantom would have had this by now."

"Doubt it," I murmured, wondering at the strange feeling of tears prickling in my eyes. He'd shown me three times, and I didn't have the faintest clue what to do. But I fixed a fake smile on my face and nodded when he was done. I could figure out what to do on my own… probably.

He didn't look at all convinced, but he backed off, turning to his own experiment.

I grabbed the small device, studying it. Those had to be the input wires that got stuck into the charge ectoplasm to draw the energy out. That was the battery I was hopefully going to charge. This switch was… I blinked at it for a few moments. This switch was hopefully unimportant. Along with that wire attached to the side. And the small dial.

"Here goes nothing," I mouthed, dropping the two wires into the green goop. A small light on the device lit up, a soft humming sound filling the room. After a moment, my forehead started to wrinkle. The wires were starting to glow… the device was getting hot…

"Danny!" Dad said sharply, grabbing the device out of my hand and yanking the wires out of the charged goop. "You're going to blow a circuit! I told you to monitor the current so we don't fry the transducers. They're expensive."

I stared at him for a second blankly, going over his hurried instructions in my head. Yeah, he probably _had_ mentioned something about amps and milliamps. "I'm trying, okay?"

"No, you're not." Dad pushed his hand through his hair, standing the short hairs on end. "You _know_ how to do this, Ghost…" he broke off suddenly and shook his head. "Danny." Closing his eyes, he dropped into the chair next to me and sighed. "Danny, I'm sorry. I keep thinking you're that ghost. You sound so much like him and you look so much like him…" A weird look crossed his face and he shot me a glance. "I just keep thinking you should know what he does… does that make sense?"

Silently, I shook my head. My head was starting to hurt and I wanted to go upstairs and go back to sleep. Instead, I picked up the small device, quietly turning the dial to adjust for the stronger current, and stuck it back in the goop.

My mind drifted back to my dad's quick speech. He was putting things together, trying to figure out what was going on. He kept thinking I was Phantom… he kept treating me like I was Phantom… I wondered blandly how much longer before he put it together.

He was rather dense and oblivious, but he was really smart when he wanted to be. I've often overheard Mom talking about how he can make leaps of logic like nobody she'd ever met. He was really good at taking two and two and a mystery number and figuring out the answer was supposed to be seven.

The only thing that was keeping him from figuring out that I was Phantom was the minor fact that I was human and Phantom was a ghost. When someone's looking for a connection between the two, it takes an inhuman leap of illogic to be able to come up with 'half-ghost, half-human superhero'.

It wasn't until the device in my hand actually began to sputter and smoke that I realized something was wrong. I dropped the rapidly heating device, listening to it skitter on the hard tabletop. "Danny?" my dad asked, reaching over to grab the tiny invention, staring down at it with frustration growing in his eyes. With the amount of smoke, I'd probably destroyed all the transducers. "You didn't listen to me about the current?"

I dropped my eyes to the table, fixing my gaze on the vaguely glowing goop. It wasn't so much that I hadn't listened, just that I had been so wrapped up in my own thoughts that I couldn't concentrate.

My dad sighed; a long, drawn-out, and heavy breath. "Danny…" I could hear him hesitate. He had no idea what to say to me.

My fingers curled on the tabletop and I dropped my chin back down onto arms, closing my eyes. I was tired, my head ached from all the thinking, and I really just wanted to be left alone. That, and I didn't want to look over at my father. I really didn't want to see the disappointment in his eyes.

"Danny," Dad sighed again, confusion sparkling in his eyes when he looked over at me sitting in _Phantom's_ chair. "Danny," he continued, frustration evident in his voice. "Danny, you're not really _helping. Y_ou're just getting in the way."

Even though the hollowness in my stomach was curled around my emotions, I couldn't help the small wince that went through me. Was that all I was? In the way?

_Maybe if I was Phantom…_

"You can go upstairs if you want, sweetie, you don't have to stay down here," Mom said distractedly, examining the results of her test.

_You never would have said that if I was Phantom…_

_You'd love me if I was Phantom…_

I sat there for a long moment. I swallowed hard, stood up, and walked over to the stairs. Stopping to look back, I saw that my mom was still busy at work, my dad staring down at the invention I had fried with an odd look on his face. "Alright," I whispered.

I don't know if they heard me.

Frankly, I don't know if they cared I was gone.

I do know that _I_ didn't care if I was gone.

* * *

_ _Jack_ _

"Maddie?" I asked, my voice quiet.

"What?" She glanced up at me, pushing her goggles up onto her forehead at my confused look.

I had no idea how to phrase my thoughts. There was just that nagging _something_ poking the back of my brain. The universe was trying to tell me I had just figured out something really important. I just wish I knew what.

"Danny…" I shook my head, starting over. "Did Danny seem a little strange to you?"

"How so?"

"He… he _knew_ what we were doing." I grabbed a rag and quietly started to clean up the mess Danny had left on the floor, my mind racing. "It was like he'd done all this before…"

Maddie knelt down next to me, her hand dropping on top of mine. "How could he have, Jack? The only two people down here have been you and me. Danny hasn't been here."

"And Phantom," I whispered, calling the ghost by his real name for the first time. The enigmatic ghost that looked just like my son. I sighed, my brain refusing to put the pieces together into something that made sense.

"Danny's not a ghost, he's depressed." She wandered back across the lab, her normally smiling mouth twisted at the corners as she struggled to figure out what to do about our son. "We shouldn't have sent him back upstairs… Maybe we should go get him… Or should we leave him alone for a bit?"

Carefully dropping the remains of the beaker into the trash, I knew that the universe was probably laughing at me.

"Danny." I shook my head sourly. "Phantom. Danny. Phantom." A tiny little flutter slid through my stomach. I knew I was close, but the pieces just would_ not_ fit together.

I sincerely hoped whoever was laughing at me was having a really good time.

* * *

_ _Danny_ _

That had been three days ago. They hadn't talked to me since. Yeah, they said things in passing, but they didn't really _talk_. Their minds were always elsewhere.

Each time they walked past me, the darkness in my mind grew a little bit. I wasn't fighting it anymore. What was the point? I was just _in the way._

I was sitting at the kitchen table, staring vacantly down at my plate of scrambled eggs. They were cold. Mom had made them hours earlier, and then hadn't bothered to wake me up to enjoy them when they were warm. She wouldn't have done that for _Phantom_, she cared about _Phantom_. She would have woken _him_ up to eat breakfast as a family.

Never once did it cross my mind that my mom might have made me a homemade breakfast and then decided to let me sleep in, fighting my dad over the leftovers so that she could save some for me.

I stabbed down, scraping my fork across the plate. What use was I? I was just their son. Not their stupid lab partner. They didn't care about me. Maybe if I was _Phantom_…

"Morning, sweetie," Mom said as she came up the stairs. "I heard you get up."

I nodded. She walked over to the sink and started filling a glass of water, setting one of her stupid inventions on the counter. I felt words collecting in my throat, wanting to be said, a whole conversation of words. But I just sat there, silent, mushing my cold eggs around on my plate.

Mom stopped the water and came over to the table, tipping her head as she examined me. I glared down at the plate of eggs. "Do you want to do something today?"

"Like what?" I asked.

"We have those big test results to go over today. You want to help?"

I froze. "No," I hissed. That was the _last_ thing I wanted to do.

She sighed. "Okay." She was silent for a minute. "What's wrong, Danny?"

"Nothing."

"Something is wrong."

I looked up at her, the shadows that were trying to swallow me tearing at me heart. "Nothing is wrong. I'm just…" I trailed off. I couldn't say it. I couldn't say that I wanted them to love me again. I couldn't confess how much it hurt that they had abandoned me. All I wanted was for them to look at me. Pay attention to _me_.

"You're lonely," she finished softly.

I nodded mutely. I couldn't think of any better excuse.

"Mads!" Dad called from the lab, "The results are done!"

Mom, her love of science showing through to the end, glanced away from me. I followed her gaze to the lab door. She wanted to go. She was practically vibrating with the desire to know the answers to those stupid tests.

_But she didn't go_. "Sweetie," she said softly. She walked over to me and placed her arm around me, giving me a quick hug. "We haven't abandoned you."

I looked up at her, a small spark of hope building in my chest. I could feel it burning away the darkness that had swallowed me. This was it. This was the end of the pain.

"We'll go to the movies tonight, alright honey? Just us three." She smiled brilliantly.

Happiness chocking my throat, I couldn't speak. I just nodded. She was here, talking to me, _wanting_ me. Things would be all right after all. They could help me.

She squeezed me tightly for a second. "Perfect. It's a plan." Then she stood up, reaching over to grab the invention she'd set on the counter.

And walked away to check those lab results.

And left me alone.

Again.

Pushing away from the table, I felt my heart finally shatter into a million pieces. I raced upstairs, knowing that, like poor Humpty Dumpty, my spirit would never be put back together again. It _hurt_.

* * *

_ _Maddie_ _

I sat down on the bottom stair, carefully turning on the invention I'd taken up into the kitchen with me. It was kind of like a camera… only it took a picture of spectral creatures. It was the only way that Jack and I got a look at some of the weaker ghosts.

Jack sank onto the stair next to me, leaning over as I flipped through the pictures on the tiny LCD screen. Finally, I reached the one that had just been taken. There was the kitchen, the table, the door, and even a blurry bit of myself. Danny was sitting at the kitchen table, looking grumpy and disheveled.

Seemingly transposed over his messy black hair and sad blue eyes was another image; one of a depressed teenager that looked exactly the same as our son, only with white hair and green eyes.

I couldn't move; I didn't know what to think. There was just no way… it wasn't possible… no… not my son… no… Jack was right. Phantom and Danny _were_ connected somehow… that explained the way they looked so much alike, sounded so much alike, acted so much alike… They were like some twisted form of twins... they were probably laughing about it behind my back, snickering at the fact that I was unable to figure it out, joking about the idea that I was hunting the reflection of my own _son_...

I needed to ask them a million questions, I wanted to scream and shout at them, but I still couldn't move. My fingers were clenched around the camera, my knuckled beginning to turn white.

Jack quietly took the camera out of my hands and pulled me to my feet, lead me up the stairs and sat me down on a kitchen chair.


	5. Epilogue

_Immediately Following the Prologue_

* * *

_ _Danny_ _

I was back in the kitchen as Phantom after softly apologizing to my parents. My parents had raced up to my room, and now all I had to do was wait for the awful truth to reveal itself. My breath caught in my throat as I heard the door to my bedroom creak open. I clenched my eyes shut at the horrible silence that filled the house for a heartbeat. And then two. And then three.

In a few moments of pain so intense that I'd felt the world break, I'd done something I _wouldn't_ live to regret.

Above me, in what used to be my room, I heard my mother scream when they found _it_.

All I could do was listen.

After all – I wasn't in the way anymore.

_The end._


End file.
